“The purpose of this facilitated session is for you and other stakeholders to propose, and collectively discuss, climate change mitigation policy options, including carbon pricing. Federal and provincial working group representatives will be there to hear your ideas. The solutions you bring to this session will help the working groups develop options to be submitted to provincial, territorial and federal Ministers in September 2016. The Ministers will review the working groups’ reports and provide recommendations to First Ministers in Fall 2016, which will form the basis for the pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change.”

CanGEA will be there to make sure that renewable heat is not forgotten. The governments, provincial and federal, have done a good job of supporting renewable power, but approximately 1/3rd of Canada’s GHG emissions are from the built environment. So Canada’s complete climate change mitigation strategy must include identifying, and incentivizing, sources of sustainable heat. A carbon tax is an excellent ‘stick’ to reduce wastefulness but unless there is a corresponding ‘carrot’ to encourage replacement of old heating systems with new technologies, the adoption of new, zero emission, technologies will be rather slow.